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South Africa and the Communist International
Apollon Davidson, Irina Filatova, Valentin Gorodnov and Sheridan Johns, (eds), South Africa and the Communist International: A Documentary History. Volume 1. Socialist Pilgrims to Bolshevik Footsoldiers 1919-1930 (London, Frank Cass, 2003) ISBN 0-7146-5280-6 (£55 hb); Volume 2. Bolshevik Footsoldiers to Victims of Bolshevisation 1931-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 2003) ISBN 0-7146-5281-4 (£55 hb).
The challenge of making more widely accessible the holdings of the Comintern archives in Moscow continues to be met in a variety of ways. In addition to programmes of digitalisation, like the Incomka project, or the microfilming of holdings relating to particular communist parties, since the opening of the archives there have been appeared a number of publications making more limited selections of documents available to a wide readership. A few, like the Dimitrov diaries and the Stalin-Molotov correspondence, replicate relatively faithfully what the researcher can expect to find meeting the description given.[1] Other collections, though equally authentic in terms of the individual documents reproduced, are hardly less didactically selective than some of the collections which communist parties themselves used to produce. The editors of the volume under review note how 'sensationalist' disclosures upon the opening of the archives made their own work both 'politically and practically' more difficult, and early editions of documents, such as L'argent de Moscou and The Secret World of American Communism, cannot be exempted from the same criticism.[2] At their best they may be regarded as documentary essays, presenting otherwise arbitrary selections of documents to present distinct lines of argument. As a representation of what the archives told us about particular communist parties, they were clearly inferior than attempts to synthesise a larger body of materials such as Studer's Un parti sous influence and Thorpe's The British Communist Party and Moscow.[3]
Apollon Davidson and his colleagues have provided an important addition to the literature that falls somewhere between the two approaches. Like Studer and Thorpe, they focus on the relations between the Comintern and one of its national sections. In their case too, it is one of the smaller sections, though, as we now know, the CPSA/SACP was also one of its most durable and, in the longer term, effective of the parties established after the Russian revolution. Like Studer and Thorpe, they aim to provide what they describe as a 'comprehensive' survey of their subject, but in the form of a collection of documents 'let[ting] the documents speak' rather than simply illustrating the editors' own text, which was deliberately kept to a minimum. Such an ambition is always problematic, and as the editors' own annotations often show, the provision of context, analogy or an awareness of other sources is often crucial in allowing even individual documents to 'speak' to any but the highly specialist reader. Nevertheless, over two volumes and 183 documents, the editors go a long way towards their goal of covering the different phases of Comintern strategy, the institutional structures which gave it force, both the 'secret' and 'mass' aspects of its political activity and — a point the editors particularly stress — the human actors involved, be they South African or Russian.
Only a researcher familiar with the original documents could comment on the particular selections made, but the editing is clearly of a meticulous standard. Excisions, amendments and handwritten annotations are minutely described, and the annotations are extremely clear and helpful. To the specialist in other areas of Comintern history, the general context and many of the broad issues documented will be familiar. However, the distinctiveness of the CPSA's situation is also very evident, not only in the persistent dilemmas of race, class and nation in the special circumstances of a white settler republic, but in the partial replication of colonial-style relationships within the Comintern itself. In particular, the CPGB was accorded special responsibilities with regard to the South African party, exercised through individuals like Jimmy Shields and George Hardy, while conversely the volumes contain a good deal of information on CPSA leaders like Douglas Wolton who also played a more limited role in the British party's affairs. If the volumes are therefore of particular interest for the CPGB's historians, the extensive discussions of the 'independent native republic' thesis will have a resonance for historians of the CPUSA, whose future general secretary Eugene Dennis was a Comintern emissary in South Africa in 1932-3.
Focusing on the CPSA's relations with the Comintern, this collection can usefully be consulted alongside Allison Drew's equally invaluable broader documentary history of the South African left.[4] The volumes also include a helpful introductory overview of the CPSA's early history, a biographical 'glossary' and sixteen pages of plates.
